Wiz

Sierra

Wiz

Wiz sells annual subscriptions based on the number of cloud workloads (virtual machines, containers, serverless functions) protected. Pricing scales with cloud consumption — as customers use more cloud, they pay Wiz more.

This aligns perfectly with the broader trend of growing cloud spend.

The agentless model is a key pricing advantage. Traditional security tools require installing software agents on every server, which creates deployment costs, performance overhead, and maintenance burden.

Wiz connects via API to cloud provider accounts and scans everything externally. Deployment takes minutes instead of months, which dramatically shortens the sales cycle.

ARR growth was record-breaking: $1 million within months of launch, $100 million in 18 months, $350 million by 2023, and reportedly over $500 million by 2024. No enterprise SaaS company has ever scaled this fast.

Sierra

Companies pay Sierra to run their customer service with AI agents instead of hiring rooms full of humans. The agent talks to your customers over chat.

It answers questions. It processes returns.

It updates subscriptions. Here is the clever part.

Sierra charges based on outcomes, not seats. Brands pay when the AI actually resolves a problem, not just for having the software installed.

That pricing is unusual. Most software charges a flat monthly fee no matter what.

Sierra only gets paid when the bot does the job.

Wiz

The four Wiz co-founders — Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik — had already built and sold a cybersecurity company together. Their previous startup, Adallom, was a cloud security company that Microsoft acquired in 2015 for $320 million.

After the acquisition, all four worked at Microsoft leading the Cloud Security Group.

By 2020, they were ready to leave and build again. They saw a gap in cloud security: as companies rushed workloads to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, security tools hadn't kept pace.

Existing solutions required installing agents on every server and generated floods of alerts that security teams couldn't process. The cloud was a mess of misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and hidden vulnerabilities — and nobody had a clear picture of it all.

Wiz launched in January 2020 — literally weeks before COVID-19 shut the world down. Instead of slowing them, the pandemic accelerated their market.

Every company on Earth was rushing to the cloud, and Wiz's agentless approach meant customers could deploy it in minutes with zero infrastructure changes. Connect your cloud account, and Wiz scans everything — VMs, containers, serverless functions, databases, identity configurations — building a complete risk map.

Sierra

Bret Taylor had already done the impossible twice. He co-created Google Maps.

He later became co-CEO of Salesforce, chaired Twitter's board during the messy Elon Musk takeover, and became chairman of OpenAI in late 2023. Clay Bavor spent 18 years at Google, most recently running its Labs group.

The two friends left their big jobs in 2023 to build something together. They picked customer service on purpose.

It is the least glamorous corner of software. Their logic was simple.

Companies hate their support costs. Customers hate waiting on hold.

AI that actually resolves problems could fix both sides at once. They launched Sierra in February 2024 with $110 million from Sequoia and Benchmark.

Wiz

Wiz grew through a combination of product excellence and founder credibility. The four co-founders had already sold a company to Microsoft and led cloud security there.

When they said "we built a better way," CISOs believed them because of the track record.

The product sold itself through demonstrations. Wiz's 15-minute deployment — connect your cloud account, see your risk map immediately — was the most effective sales tool.

Security vendors typically require weeks or months of setup. Wiz showed results in a single meeting.

Landing massive logos early created a cascade. Within two years, Wiz had 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers.

When one CISO at a major bank buys Wiz, every other bank CISO hears about it. Enterprise security is a trust-based market, and early customer logos created a self-reinforcing credibility loop.

Sierra

Sierra went straight for big brands, not tiny startups. SoFi, Ramp, ADT, Sonos and Brex signed up early.

By 2026 it said more than 40% of the Fortune 50 were customers. The trick was trust.

Enterprises are terrified of an AI bot going rogue and insulting a customer. So Sierra built guardrails and let each company control exactly how the agent behaves.

Bret Taylor's contacts did the rest. When the chairman of OpenAI calls a Fortune 500 CEO, they pick up.

Sierra hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in November 2025, seven quarters after launch, and $150 million by February 2026. In April 2026 it launched Ghostwriter, which builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

Wiz

The Google acquisition decision dominated 2024. Wiz turned down Google's $23 billion offer in July 2024, with Rappaport saying they wanted to pursue an IPO and build an independent company.

Then they accepted a $32 billion offer later — the largest cybersecurity acquisition in history. The deal raised questions about cloud neutrality: Wiz secures AWS, Azure, and GCP equally, but becoming owned by Google could make AWS and Azure customers nervous.

Before the acquisition, the competitive landscape was intensifying. Palo Alto Networks acquired cloud security startups aggressively.

CrowdStrike expanded from endpoint security into cloud. AWS, Azure, and Google all improved their native security tools.

Wiz's lead was real but competitors were closing in.

Sierra

Everyone is building AI customer service agents right now. Decagon has raised at a multi-billion valuation.

Salesforce, ServiceNow and Intercom all shipped their own agents. Sierra is not the cheap option.

It sells premium AI to giant companies that move slowly. The bigger risk sits underneath the product.

Sierra does not make its own AI models. It rents them from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

If those model makers decide to compete directly, Sierra's edge gets thin fast, and its co-founder chairing one of them only makes that question louder. A $15.8 billion valuation on roughly $150 million in revenue leaves almost no room for a stumble.

Wiz

Wiz Cloud Security Platform — the core product that provides agentless visibility across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, exposed secrets, and identity risks.

Wiz Runtime Sensor — a lightweight agent (optional) that adds real-time threat detection to the agentless scanning foundation. Wiz Code — security scanning integrated into the developer pipeline, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production.

Wiz Defend — a cloud detection and response product that identifies and helps contain active threats in real time. Wiz Security Graph — a visual map of an organization's entire cloud environment showing how every resource connects and where attack paths exist.

Sierra

The core product is the Sierra AI agent. It is a branded customer service bot that companies deploy on their website, app, and phone lines.

It handles the boring stuff. Order tracking.

Refunds. Password resets.

Account changes. Sierra also built its own tools to test and monitor these agents so they do not make things up.

In 2024 the company added a voice version that talks to customers on the phone. In April 2026 it added Ghostwriter, a tool that builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

The whole pitch is one AI agent that carries your brand's name and never sleeps.

Wiz

Sequoia Capital led early rounds and was the most prominent backer. Index Ventures, Insight Partners, and Greenoaks Capital participated in growth rounds.

Cyberstarts (an Israeli cyber-focused VC) was an early seed investor. Andreessen Horowitz invested in later rounds.

The final private valuation of $12 billion came in a 2024 funding round before the $32 billion Google acquisition.

Sierra

Sequoia Capital and Benchmark wrote the first checks at launch in February 2024, $110 million between them. Greenoaks Capital then led both the $175 million round in 2024 and the $350 million round in September 2025.

In May 2026 Tiger Global and Google's GV led a $950 million round at a $15.8 billion valuation, with Benchmark, Sequoia and Greenoaks back in. That takes total funding to about $1.6 billion.

That is partly the product and partly Bret Taylor. Investors bet on founders who have already built billion-dollar things.